Climb every mountain, ford every extreme in “Infinite Storm”
Rated R. 98 minutes. In theaters.
When performers sign on as producers of their movies, it can feel like a statement of intent. That’s the case with the true-life drama “Infinite Storm,” starring Naomi Watts as a grieving woman on an unexpected rescue mission. The movie has an appealing, streamlined trajectory: The woman hikes up and down a mountain, pausing to save a lost soul. With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.
Early on Oct. 17, 2010, a New Hampshire woman named Pam Bales set off on a 6-mile hike up Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast. The temperature was expected to hit the high 20s, with winds reaching 80 mph. Bales, though, was a lifelong hiker and a search-andrescue volunteer. So she stashed extra layers and snow goggles in her pack before heading into an area she called an office and playground. “At 5,000 feet, about three miles in,” she later wrote in Backpacker magazine, “the wind began to pick up around me.”
Even for those who enjoy hiking (on level ground in lovely weather, thank you), this sounds like lunacy. The presence of a sympathetic performer such as Watts, though, eases doubts even as it deepens the stakes. You’re already on Pam’s side when she wakes up at home in the gray early morning. Alone, she patters around her isolated house, which is filled with homey touches and picturesquely parked near a river. It’s quiet inside, which prompts you to wonder about the children smiling in the framed photographs. Mostly, you settle into the stillness and vibe on the methodical rhythms of Pam’s preparing for what looks like a very serious hike.
The world comes into view and increasingly fills the silence. Pam stops by a restaurant, where she exchanges pleasantries with a friend (Denis O’hare) and fills in some blanks. It’s a brief, outwardly perfunctory interlude: He tells her to be careful and she reminds him that it’s an anniversary of an unspoken event. The scene seeds the ground with questions (what is she commemorating and why?), but mostly seems construed to appease anyone who might be disturbed by all the quiet and a woman alone: She isn’t a nut, the scene reassures you, and she has at least one friend and even a rationale for heading into the forbidding wilderness alone.
Pam’s trek is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s a doozy. Director Malgorzata Szumowska sketches in the forbidding lay of the land with sweeping aerial shots of the snowy mountain range that cut Pam down to speck size. Szumowska also shrewdly uses distance to accentuate Pam’s physicality, allowing you to see the character head to toe, just like when Fred Astaire danced. You see the labored exertion in Pam’s — and Watts’ — every step as clearly as the puffs of frigid air she exhales. As her efforts intensify, she warms up and strips off her shirt, revealing her midriff and the steady tensing of her muscled arms and shoulders.
Watts is a supremely expressive actress and, like Astaire, a full-body performer. The image of her frolicking on a cliff for the giant ape in “King Kong” was the best part of that movie, and her character’s thrilling emotional workout in “Mulholland Drive” remains vivid. Watts is particularly brilliant at articulating a character’s inner being; she brings out what lies beneath so clearly and persuasively that you can see every thought and emotion fluttering into existence. That serves her character here beautifully, even if Pam’s goggles can get in the way. I could watch an entire movie of Pam — really Watts — going solo up this mountain.
That Iron Woman trek takes a turn when the weather does, and Pam finds a man (Billy Howle) crouched in the snow and nearly frozen. She warms him up by stripping off his clothes (good to know!) and then vows to take him to safety. The going is agonizing, at times gripping, and is slowed down only by gauzy, explanatory flashbacks to Pam’s earlier life. We don’t need to know anything about Pam’s past because her story is already evident in each step and every smile, and in a translucent performance that confirms watching Watts on this journey is destination enough.